Meteor showers from Lomé in 2026

Meteor showers over Lomé in 2026

Twelve showers, one city. From Lomé, Maritime — 6.1°N, 1.22°E, 13 m, Africa/Lome — 12 of them put a radiant above the horizon in darkness at maximum, 2 pass ten an hour, and the Geminids tops the 2026 list at 51.8 an hour.

Clock time here runs 5 minutes behind mean solar time, so local solar midnight on the Geminids peak night falls at 23:49 rather than 00:00. Lomé, Maritime is the 168th largest of the 300 cities on this site, with a population of 2.19 million.

The three best nights of 2026 here

The Geminids peaks at 13:41 on 14 December 2026 Lomé time. Its radiant culminates 64.0° up at 01:58 bearing N, the Moon is 29% lit, and 23:00–05:00 is the window — about 51.8 meteors an hour on this city's own measured sky.

Behind it, the Perseids manages 25.7 an hour on 13 August (radiant 37.5° at best, Moon 0% lit) and the Quadrantids 8.0 on 3 January (radiant 29.7°, Moon 99%). Those are the three nights worth defending in a calendar; the full ranking for Lomé is in the table below.

At the other end of the list the Ursids manages 0.4 an hour on 22 December with the radiant reaching 20.6° at culmination, and the faintest one that still puts anything measurable in the sky here is the October Draconids at 1.0 an hour on 9 October.

What this latitude allows

Every one of the twelve gets its radiant above the Lomé horizon at some point on the night of maximum — a property of the tropics at 6.1°N, where radiants in both celestial hemispheres rise at some hour. The lowest any of them culminates is the Ursids, at 20.6°.

Nothing is circumpolar from 6.1°N among these twelve: every radiant sets at some point, which is why the hourly tables on the shower pages for Lomé rise and fall rather than staying flat.

Sunset, twilight and real darkness

On the Geminids peak night the Sun sets over Lomé at 17:42, astronomical darkness runs 18:57 to 04:42, and sunrise is 05:57 — 9 h 44 min of real darkness inside 12 h 14 min of night. These are Africa/Lome times, which is what you set an alarm by.

Across the twelve peak nights of 2026, astronomical darkness at Lomé runs from 9 h 10 min on the Southern delta-Aquariids night (31 July) to 9 h 44 min on the Leonids night (17 November). Long nights give a shower room to perform even when its radiant rises late.

Moon luck in 2026

Moon phase makes or breaks a meteor year. In 2026 the showers that catch a dark Moon from Lomé are Perseids (0% lit, 25.7/h).

Working against them, Quadrantids (99% lit), Orionids (81% lit) run into a bright Moon for most of the dark window, which is already priced into the rates quoted on this page.

Near Lomé

The closest other cities covered here are Accra (169 km WSW), Lagos (243 km E), Kumasi (321 km WNW), Ibadan (327 km ENE), Benin City (487 km E). Within a few tens of kilometres the radiant altitudes are effectively identical, so the reason to open a neighbour's page is the clock: sunset, moonrise and the peak window all shift with longitude and, across a border, with the time zone.

5 of the 300 cities lie within 500 km of here, and Lomé is the only one covered in its country. The nearest, Accra, is 169 km WSW on a bearing of 248°.

What this page does not know

Every rate here uses this city's measured sky brightness, derived from satellite night-lights data and modelled down to a zenith brightness. It is one number for a whole metropolitan area, so a dark park on the edge of town will beat it and a floodlit street will not match it, and it describes the sky overhead rather than the whole horizon-to-horizon view the Bortle scale grades.

Cloud cover is not baked into this page — it is a forecast that changes by the hour, so it is resolved live rather than at build time and shows as "unavailable" in the tables rather than being assumed to be zero. Meteor outbursts, local terrain and building horizons are not modelled.

A single observer with an unobstructed horizon typically records 30–50% below the ideal-sky figures quoted here. Give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt, keep bright screens away, look about halfway up the sky rather than straight at the radiant, and count for a full hour before judging a shower.